If Facebook made getting in touch with old friends and reaching out to new friends easier, Twitter made it faster and much more creative. It is not so easy to be efficiently expressive in just 140 characters. This is exactly why it becomes an awesome choice for businesses too. However, watch out. Even 140 characters hold a whole new world of potential disasters you don’t even want to imagine for your business.

Stay away from the minefield

The most important lesson in social media marketing is ‘Know Thy Enemy’. It doesn’t take much of a genius to figure out if a campaign can spiral out of your control or garner any hate. Always take some time to look at the campaign or even a single tweet from a distance and try to gauge what could go wrong. Don’t even think of stepping into the grim and twisted territory emotive topics. Avoid commenting on controversial topics; don’t even try to make a joke out of it. Speaking of humor, avoid it completely in case of sensitive topics like a natural disaster or a global unrest or anything that involves lives of other people/animals.

Keep it exclusive

While pop culture may not have left much room for originality, you have to make sure your content is exclusive and as ‘you’ as possible. To be able to send out your message in the most appealing way in just 140 characters is quite a talent. And if you manage to pull this off, the followers will just keep pouring in asking for more.

Make it useful

Humor and promotions only go so far. However, brand loyalty and recall come when your audience gets something useful from you without even paying for it. Post tips, fun facts and stats relevant to your niche. Give them links to blogs, news and something educational every now and then. Not only does it make you look like a brand that actually cares about its customers, but also someone who hasn’t hidden a promotional offer in every word and hashtag.

Don’t spam

Keep it subtle, cool and classy. Just because you are a business not an individual, doesn’t mean you get to over-abuse that follow button and get away with it. Following people is, undeniably, a good thing, but try to make sure the follows and follow-backs are balanced. You can’t be following a thousand people and have only about 50 followers in return; that looks just too bad. Also, don’t over-tag your followers. Be strategic in the people you follow. Find the top influencers in your niche; interact with them and make sure you get enough retweets. Another important thing- ease off the ‘direct messages’, nothing screams spam like an inbox full of links and promotional messages.

Don’t ignore

Twitter has so elegantly bridged that invisible yet impenetrable gap between celebrities and the common people. This explains its instant catapult and seemingly permanent seat on the pinnacle of glory. This also explains why it’s easier to market via Twitter. Therefore, feel free to use it to your potential, because your audience and followers already are. Reply to every query your followers tweet for you except, of course, the ones that are too pointless and infantile. Offer help where help is needed, respond to the direct messages and the like; it shows that you take your audiences seriously and genuinely care about helping them out, which is almost always a good thing.
The dream of a successful Twitter marketing isn’t a cold day in hell, nor is it an impossible task. All you need to do is pay attention to your tweets and audience, have fun with what you’re doing and stay honest.

Mark Tyler, the author of this article, is an online marketing executive with eMarket Elite, leading providers of internet marketing solutions. He is an avid traveler and is passionate about photography.